I agree on all your points except the last one, cuz it's untrue and can't do that! It can cause "no picture", but not a bad one unless maybe there's a short in it that leaks into chassis ground causing noise, etc.

I agree mostly with you, but from the point of view of a normal user, who doesn't make the distinction between the physical cablecard and the cablecard firmware, that's not true. The current FIOS HBO poor picture problems are caused by cablecards, and can be fixed by swapping cablecards until one happens to get an 017 cablecard, and then the problems are solved. From the point of view of the user, they had a bad cablecard and then got a good one.

You're not limited to .5TB on the base roamio. All you have to do is plop in a new internal AV drive from the likes of WD in 1,2 or 3 TB sizes and woila', new bigger TiVo recording space! It automatically formats it and sets it up for you. Yes, it's THAT easy! See the main Roamio forum and read the "Hard Drive Upgrade Info" thread.

I guess it is a good thing automobile manufactures do not have this business model.

Oh, believe me, they do.
There are forums like this for just about every popular car out there. The cars don't *usually* fail at performing their basic functions (stopping and going) but there are tons of medium to small annoyances, especially in the first model year of a new car.

I agree with everyone who is irritated at the growing pains so many are having to endure for the Roamio experience, but like it or not, our choices are to put up with it, or to use something else.

The Premiere was buggy as hell, at least for me, for a good year after it was released. So far the Roamio rollout seems to be going more smoothly based on my memory of the Premiere rollout.
I wish it was perfect too, but I'll take it. It's good enough, and I do believe most, if not all, of the major problems will be fixed at some point.

I agree mostly with you, but from the point of view of a normal user, who doesn't make the distinction between the physical cablecard and the cablecard firmware, that's not true. The current FIOS HBO poor picture problems are caused by cablecards, and can be fixed by swapping cablecards until one happens to get an 017 cablecard, and then the problems are solved. From the point of view of the user, they had a bad cablecard and then got a good one.